The goal of vegetable breeding is to combine various desirable traits in a single variety/hybrid. Such desirable traits may include any trait deemed beneficial by a grower and/or consumer, including greater yield, resistance to insects or disease, tolerance to environmental stress, and nutritional value.
Breeding techniques take advantage of a plant's method of pollination. There are two general methods of pollination: a plant self-pollinates if pollen from one flower is transferred to the same or another flower of the same plant or plant variety. A plant cross-pollinates if pollen comes to it from a flower of a different plant variety.
Advances in molecular genetics have made it possible to select plants based on genetic markers linked to traits of interest, a process called marker assisted selection (MAS). While breeding efforts to date have provided a number of useful watermelon lines and varieties with beneficial traits, there remains a need in the art for new lines and varieties with further improved traits and methods for their production. In many cases, such efforts have been hampered by difficulties in identifying and using alleles conferring beneficial traits. These efforts can be confounded by the lack of definitive phenotypic assays, and other issues such as epistasis, and polygenic or quantitative inheritance. In the absence of molecular tools such as MAS, it may not be practical to produce certain new genotypes of crop plants due to such challenges.